On July 27, 2009, Government Computer News Magazine published an article entitled “Great dot-gov Websites 2009: 10sites that take online government to the next level”. One of the ten websites is the Deep Web Technologies – powered Science.gov search engine, hosted by DOE’s Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI). Science.gov searches 38 government science collections, and comprises over 200 million pages of science information.

SANTA FE, N.M., Aug. 4, 2009 — Deep Web Technologies-powered federated search engine Science.gov (http://www.science.gov) was featured in the Government Computer News article “Great dot-gov Web Sites 2009? (http://tinyurl.com/mqs74e) as one of ten websites that take online government to the next level. “The days of a web presence being an optional component for agencies are long gone. For most citizens, the primary way of interacting with their government is through websites,” says Joab Jackson, author.

The Science.gov website, hosted by the Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI), searches 38 government science collections, comprising over 200 million pages of science information, with the ease that citizens have come to expect doing research on the Internet. Science.gov utilizes next-generation deep web search technology (called federated search), to provide one-stop access to the most comprehensive sources of government R&D information. Also provided are a host of features, including clustering of results; links to related Wikipedia and Eureka News articles; selections capability to email, download or print research results; and an alerts service. In addition, all Science.gov searches are performed in real-time, helping citizens obtain up-to-the-minute new information on topics important to them.

“We like to call the audience the science-attentive citizen,” said Sharon Jordan, OSTI’s assistant director for program integration. “We recognize that while it is of great use to scientists, there are also citizens in the public sector, as well as students and teachers, who need to know the source for authentic science information. We try to serve them all.”

Next-generation deep web searching represents the future of search, because it allows for comprehensive searching of many obscure government databases and small collections, as well as popular collections, at the same time. The application obtains results in an easy-to-follow, aggregated list, all from a single search request, placing tremendous research power in the hands of everyday citizens. Fast, effective, efficient and comprehensive information discovery is a by-product of this technology: government databases don’t necessarily contain the most popular (i.e. often-visited) information, therefore the mainstream search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and Bing, which rank results on popularity instead of relevance, aren’t as strong for information discovery purposes.